


Skeleton Crew

by deliverusfromsburb



Series: Tuesjade Prompts [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Yellow Yard, a couple very brief mentions of canonical deaths, and the implications of SOMEONE having to stuff grandpa harley
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-03
Updated: 2017-12-03
Packaged: 2019-02-10 03:17:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12902790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: The battleship was never meant to run this long.





	Skeleton Crew

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so bad at titles and summaries you guys  
> The tuesjade prompt for this week was gemsona. As you may have noticed, I did not do that.

Jaspers is the one who lets you know the engine is broken again. You wake up when you feel the weight on your legs, and there he is - trying to sap your body heat by curling up into an inconspicuous ball. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you’re that big. Davesprite has petitioned you to shrink him down to the size of a normal cat, but you’ve refused. You’re afraid if Bec’s instincts take over, you’d have an unfair advantage. Sometimes, though, you’re tempted. Especially when he tries to jump up onto the table.

You sit up, and your breath streams out of you in a cloud of white. Jaspers shifts, stretches, and yawns, looking demonic for a moment with a mouth of sharp teeth and eyes rolled back to whites. “It’s cold,” he whines.

“I know.” You shiver as the blankets slip down off your shoulders and the heat built up underneath them escapes. When you reach out with Space powers, you can tell the others haven’t woken up to notice the chill. Davesprite shifts and mumbles something in his sleep. John has managed to work his way around to being sideways across his bed, legs dangling off the edge. He’ll wake up on the floor again. It would be tempting to leave this until morning, but the consorts are cold blooded. They’ll be grumpy and lethargic.

You could go to the boys’ rooms, roll them out of bed, and make them fix it. But John would wait for instructions and then complain about you giving him orders, and Davesprite has already insisted that sprite knowledge banks don’t cover engine repairs, an excuse he has also tried unsuccessfully to get out of doing the dishes. They’d get huffy if you appeared in their rooms without asking, especially in the middle of the night. They can be so touchy. In the end, fixing it alone will be faster, and you know you’ll do a good job. The work’s not hard. It’s not as bad as the time you had to climb onto the roof to patch a leak, for example.

“It’s not as bad as…” is a game you’ve always played with yourself. Don’t whine, don’t cry, remember how much worse it could be. When you’d tried that bit of wisdom with the others during an early discussion about your situation (not much food, injured passengers, no external communications), they hadn’t been convinced. John had rolled his eyes, and Davesprite had said, “Yeah, but it’s pretty fucking bad now.” You hadn’t been sure how to respond to that. It’s an outlook you never allowed yourself to have.

You pull on socks before padding along the chilly metal hallway. Jaspers follows, twining between your feet and almost tripping you before you growl low in your throat to remind him to keep his distance. He doesn’t need the boiler on - sprites give off the heat of a computer left on. You run warm yourself these days. But cats are creatures of habit, and he doesn’t like when something in the ship isn’t going right. You don’t either. The thrum of its pistons are a second heartbeat to you - a system that’s nearly invisible when running properly but obvious in its absence. You keep it at its lowest power setting mostly for ancillary functions - the heating, running water. It’s not doing any of the work of keeping the ship in motion. Pushing the vessel along is a subroutine that runs in your subconscious, but you check on it regularly like worrying a loose tooth. None of the others seem to realize what could happen if you lost concentration, or do they put that much blind faith in you? You have waking nightmares of something breaking beyond your ability to fix it, the ship and all hands aboard plummeting downward. Without the Green Sun, your senses are too limited to see if there’s a bottom to whatever place you’re in. Would you fall forever?

This is the third time the engine has gone down this month. This ship was never supposed to run for so long.

What it was meant for was a hopeless war fought over one checkerboard planet. The vessel that you’ve made your home carried carapaces from Prospit to the place where most of them would die, a glorified taxi. Maybe it could engage with enemy ships, although you haven’t found much in the way of anti-aircraft weaponry. The carapaces might know, but you haven’t asked. John found something that might be a kind of laser ballista, or a sighting device – he’d swiveled it around and made lightsaber noises for a while before getting bored and drifting off. The hulls are thick and armor-plated, but the engine itself is lightweight. Prospit and the Battlefield are celestial neighbors. It didn’t have to travel far. And the doomed battle between kingdoms of light and dark never lasts long in Sburb, even without a cancer at the heart of the Battlefield urging it along. The equipment doesn’t have to last.

The engine room is deep within the bowels of the ship. Bowels. Innards. Viscera. There are a lot of good words for what’s enclosed within you. You’d run through them all while giving your grandfather the sendoff he would have expected, focusing on facts you’d learned from books you could barely read to take your mind off what you were doing. People told the future that way – haruspicy, the art of divining what is to come from entrails. The future you see from this ship’s guts foretells a lot more nights like this.

“Get me the toolbox?” you ask, to give Jaspers something to do, and he races off. He’s become an unofficial partner of yours in these maintenance sessions. When you have something to focus on, your Bec instincts don’t act up, and you don’t feel compelled to take a snap at him.

This ship’s chief engineer was killed on the Battlefield. A few of the carapaces aboard know a little about the ship’s workings, and they conveyed what they knew to you. Carapaces speak a little out loud, but they use gestures more, a language refined to convey only what’s important. You learned on Prospit. In the first weeks of having companionship, when meeting other people’s eyes was too overwhelming, you’d focused on their fingers, making a game of seeing what nonsense sentences their hands formed without realizing it. You don’t know a lot of the technical signs, though, and the carapaces here are mostly foot soldiers. Instead, you’ve cobbled together a strategy out of guesswork. You’re used to that. Sometimes volcanic gasses would corrode the wiring of your island’s geothermal power relay, and once your dreaming robot got struck by lightning. You’ve had to consult users manuals and make guesses, tinkering with screwdrivers and sucking shocked fingers until whatever you’re working on sputters to life.

A gear has snapped half its teeth off, and a few screws on a steam pipe are loose. “Smallest screwdriver,” you say, and Jaspers deposits it in your waiting hand. The screws are a quick fix. The gear and its broken pieces have to be fished out, and your fingers are soon smeared with grease. The ship ran out of replacement parts a few months ago. Once you have everything lined up as best as you can manage, you scowl at the metal until its atoms snap back into a lattice. The connection point is weaker, though. You’ll have a crack there again in not too long. But there’s nothing else you can do but keep patching the breaks.

You ease the gear back into place - you prefer to use your hands rather than powers for this; you’ve had them for longer and know you can trust them. It fits in with a clunk and ratchets around a few times before stopping. The whole ship has to think about repairs before starting up again. It’s like it’s buffering, even though you don’t think its technology is that advanced. The radar screens look like they date from the second world war.

“Maybe we should have engine rest days,” you say to Jaspers, leaning back against the wall. Your fingernails are stained black. “We can huddle together to keep warm, and I can fill some pots with water beforehand. That might give the ship a break.”

He crawls into your lap in that ‘I seem to have found myself here, I wonder how’ way that cats like so much. The act would be more convincing if he wasn’t so large. “I like breaks,” he says, “and cuddling.”

“Huddling,” you correct him. “I don’t know how fond the carapaces are of cats, they might not let you get close.”

“They like me better now,” he says. “They thought I was something to eat at first.”

The food chain on this ship is really getting absurd. “Maybe we should all try to stop taking chunks out of people our size, ok?”

“But I like birds,” Jaspers whines. He can be so petulant sometimes. You like to think if Bec could have talked he would have been more polite.

“He doesn’t like to be chased around any more than you do.”

He hisses softly but doesn’t argue. Maybe he knows you could start chasing him around, if you really wanted to. As a sort of apology, you stroke the fur behind his ears. If you don’t look down, you can almost pretend you’re petting Bec.

Something clinks, and the gear you replaced starts turning. You hear a louder hiss as steam moves through the pipes, and the water tanks gurgle to life. The metal against your back begins to thrum. It’ll be a while before the air warms up, but the day is saved. Again. Not that anyone besides you and this annoying cat noticed.

You ease Jaspers off your lap and stand up, rubbing your face and then regretting it when you leave a streak of smelly oil behind. You’ll have to wash up with a few handfuls of dish detergent (it’s the best you’ve got for getting rid of this kind of grease) before crawling back into bed and waiting to warm up. It’s too bad the ship can’t break down on a convenient schedule.

“Two and a half more years,” you say to Jaspers, who’s now licking his shoulder like he meant for you to ditch him. “Think we can make it?”

“I’m going to see Rose again,“ he says, which you take as a yes, or a reflection of the fact that a species that licks its own butt probably doesn’t have much of a concept of future planning, even if they have been mixed with a computer.

"That’s right. Her and Dave and the trolls.” Some of them, anyway. Near the end, Karkat had sent so many frantic messages about people dying. It had almost helped, in a way, as you knelt over Dave’s bleeding body in the snow. _Remember Jade, it can always be worse_. You know he’s ok, and Kanaya, and Aradia, at least. You’d seen their Hero of Time one last time when you’d popped into the bubbles, stunned and smoking, with the ghostly memory-imprint of the genesis frog’s temporary home still pressing into your palms. “Your friends are fine,” she’d told you, “and you’ll be fine too. You’re going to do great. I’ve already seen it. Are you ready to wake up?”

The first traces of heat are starting to curl around you. It’ll take longer for the upper levels to warm up, but it’s working. You can go to bed. Jaspers feels it too – you see his whiskers twitch, and he blinks in a slow cat-smile. “Time to go?”

“Time to go,” you agree. “And you can come with me if you promise to stay near my feet. Maybe Rose doesn’t mind waking up with a cat on her face, but I do. Even she might object now that you’re so much bigger.”

He floats out of the room, ignoring you. You may never be a cat person, but you know enough not to be too offended. Instead, you take one last look around the engine room before following him out.

“We’ll make it just fine,” you say. “We’re going to do great.”

The engine hums, almost like a response, and you feel your own heart settle. Another problem solved. Keep patching the breaks, and everything will turn out fine. 


End file.
